Case Study

Crimson Hexagon: UX as a Service

Startup

Research

Interaction Design

Simplifying social media analytics.

Challenge

Crimson Hexagon is a social media analytics platform used by companies to develop insights into consumer conversation. Insights go beyond simple positive and negative sentiment to a more nuanced portrait of drivers of sentiment, competitors, and category-level conversation. These insights can be applied towards answering strategic business questions and generating a brand strategy that is better aligned with the target customer.

Over the course of six months, EchoUser worked with the Crimson Hexagon team in a flexible UX as a Service engagement to reimagine the analytics experience and target it towards delivering insights to a new user type. EchoUser used a variety of research, testing, and design methods to create an effective and holistic solution.

EchoUser was tasked with developing a tool that would straddle the line between ease of use and rich discovery for a new target persona.

Approach

EchoUser and Crimson Hexagon kicked off the project by understanding the current tool and its capabilities. Then EchoUser interviewed current users to get an understanding of how they work and use data.

After EchoUser and Crimson Hexagon established a common understanding of the problem at hand, the EchoUser team generated several design concepts and principles to communicate how Crimson might streamline the experience. Through a joint brainstorming session, the EchoUser and Crimson teams considered multiple design directions, and ultimately picked one that best aligned with ideal design principles.

Upon finalizing the design direction, EchoUser generated wireframes and conducted nine one-hour interviews with target users. User feedback informed the iterative refinement and continued direction of these designs over time.

Once the framework for the new tool had been established, EchoUser was then tasked with identifying the nature of the data content that would be displayed within the product. We conducted additional research and interviews to get to the heart of exactly how target users prioritize and use different types of data. The research was tricky, as ideal “results” are inevitably on a case-by-case basis.

Outcome

After voluminous interviews with target users, EchoUser produced both a mental framework for how the data could be prioritized as well as a set of example content to communicate how it could be displayed within the product. This, along with the wireframes delivered previously, equipped the Crimson Hexagon team with the building blocks needed to build the most effective version of the data insights tool.